Due to increasing traffic in computer networks, such as the Internet and corporate intranets (e.g., corporate Wide Area Networks (WANs) and Local Area Networks (LANs)), data providers need to satisfy an increasing number of data requests. For example, a company that provides a search engine for the Internet may handle over a million hits (i.e., accesses to its web page) every day. In practice, a single server cannot handle such a large volume of data requests within an acceptable response time. Therefore, most high-volume information providers use a collection of multiple servers, commonly referred to as a server farm, to satisfy the large number of data requests. Access to these multiple servers is managed through load balancing.
Load balancing is a technique for spreading work (load) among the servers in the server farm. Load balancing generally improves resource utilization and decreases computing time and may be implemented in hardware, software, or a combination of hardware and software.